On Wednesday and Thursday, comet C/2022 E3, which has been known for eleven months and was last observed 48,000 years ago, will approach the closest to the planet Earth since the Ice Age.
The comet, which NASA described as having a "brighter greenish coma, short broad dust tail, and long faint ion tail running across a 2.5 degree wide field-of-view," reached its perihelion on January 12 and is anticipated to reach its perigee, or the point closest to Earth, on February 1. Since the middle of January, people have been searching for the "once-in-a-civilization" comet in the hopes of catching a glimpse of it.
E3 will still be visible in the Southern Hemisphere even though it appears to have completed its circuit of the Northern Hemisphere, according to KXAN.
According to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), comets are notoriously unpredictable, but if this one maintains its current trend in brightness, it will be simple to spot with binoculars and it's just possible that it could become visible to the unaided eye under dark skies.
